2018 - Year in Review

In trying to keep the tradition of posting a year in review, so here it goes.

Programming

This year I continued working part-time on a LAMP stack app, the one that used Angular 1.x for the UI. I also continued fixing bugs and adding new features to the “web based application to assist in monitoring local government, which I still continue to do. I did move it over to use Amazon AWS hosted Elasticsearch because the single, “small” EC2 server was being overloaded.

This year, I gave up working remote to help focus on getting the “next generation backend processing system” (mentioned in last years post) to production. I’m happy to report we did get it deployed to production in September with only a few issues in the weeks after the cut-over. In particular, we realized that heavily using blobs in Crate was not feasible, at least with our use case and cluster size. We actually migrated blob storage over to a self-hosted Minio cluster. The biggest drawback so far with Minio, is the time it takes to list objects and delete them. A co-worker developed an application that runs alongside Minio that can “age-off” data by time, by simply deleting the files from disk (on each server + disk(s)) which has been working quite well.

Looking Back

To recap, for 2018 I wanted to:

exercise regularly

I averaged 3 days per week

give up energy drinks

I didn’t completely, in June I decided to stop and I ended up having a few more from June - December (mostly because of long working days where I’d only get 3.5 - 4 hours of sleep). I do occasionally drink coffee and sometimes I’ll have other energy style drinks (hi-ball for example), though they use coffee beans for caffeine and don’t include other chemicals.

read more books

success, though I don’t retain a lot of details, which might be something to work on in 2019. I did read a few books: